The Covid-19 pandemic has been a challenging time for many businesses and law firms are no exception. Like other businesses, law firms have had to change the way they do things in order to keep their doors open and serve their clients in a safe way.
Fortunately, law firms are better equipped to handle these necessary changes than other businesses. In fact, not only can they still keep on doing business, they can even get new business by attracting new clients.
As long as you focus on law firm SEO strategies that work, you can get new leads and clients even during this unprecedented public health crisis. You can implement some of these strategies yourself, but for others you should contact a digital marketing agency to get some advice and help.
They will know how to help your law firm attract new clients under any kinds of circumstances. As digital marketing becomes more challenging and the legal arena becomes more competitive, it is essential to know how best to handle your online marketing and digital efforts to ensure you achieve the maximum impact.
The COVID-19 crisis has driven demand online for most businesses, lawyers included, and it is more important than ever to have digital marketing expertise, in-house or hired. An experienced digital marketing agency can soon pay dividends in terms of achieving the growth results that you seek online.
Improve Your Website
This is something that a digital marketing agency will be able to help you with but is a key factor in ensuring your law firm is ‘client friendly’ and open to achieving a successful strategy for acquiring clients.
But improving your website does not just mean making it look and run better, though both of those are important, it also means improving the content so that it is more search-engine friendly.
Providing the right content is a key factor in attracting the right clients. It’s as simple as that – albeit a ‘simple solution’ that requires some key questioning and research.
Content will drive traffic to your site. Or in other words, improving its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to permit the right traffic to come to your site. That means using keywords and phrases on your website that people are looking for.
There are a wide variety of tools to be used when looking for keywords that will help attract clients to your website and an equally large number of ways to go about handling this issue. We recently wrote about some of the ‘stealth’ SEO law marketing tactics here.
You should think about the questions your clients might ask and include them in FAQ pages on your website. That will give you an advantage because people are likely to type those same questions in search engines, and since your website will have the answers to those questions, it increases the chances of your site showing up first when they enter those search terms.
Additionally, the content of your website should be engaging and up to date, meaning that you should have a prominent section on your website that lets clients know how you can help them during the Covid-19 crisis.
Your website should also have updated client success stories that show how you have helped people with their legal problems. If people see that you have helped other people with similar problems to theirs, then you will be able to attract new clients. Your website should also have responsive design, meaning that it works just as well on mobile devices as it does on PCs.
Start Using Video More
This might seem intimidating at first but it doesn’t have to be with new video production tools and other software that can make video marketing extremely effective and inexpensive. By making short videos that let people get to know you a little better, you can build trust between you and your audience since it can make them feel like they have met you face to face.
It is the building of authority online that helps create the necessary trust to ensure you are able to reach clients with credibility and ease. Video can do that readily and highly effectively.
You can post these videos on your social media accounts and/or on your firm’s website. You can use your phone to shoot those videos or you can use a more elaborate set-up with a camcorder and video editing software. But no matter what you use, the videos should be short— between ninety seconds and two minutes— and be focused on answering the same kinds of questions that are on your FAQ pages.
Use Social Media More
If you do not already have an established social media presence, then you should take the time to build one. You can post the videos you make on those accounts as well as encouraging and informative posts. People are spending more time on social media while in lockdown so you can use that to your advantage.
You can focus mainly on Facebook since it has the widest reach of all the platforms, but you can share those posts on other platforms as well.
These are just some of the techniques should help you to get new clients despite the fact that you may not be able to meet them face to face. As terrible as the pandemic is, it won’t last forever, so you should make sure that your firm is ready for when it is finally over and, more significantly, be aware that there will always be an increased online demand for services both during and after the pandemic.
There have been substantial online marketing changes for lawyers but in essence the key towards achieving new clients and increasing client enquiry is to focus upon achieving authority (good content), obtaining access to your visitors by using good contact and social media connections, directories etc and achieving a good ‘call to action’ where you actively request interested parties to contact you about your services.
The COVID crisis provides an opportunity to sharpen and enhance your law firm’s digital marketing expertise and skills so that you can drive more clients to your firm.
